Installing latest OS on 2007 macbook pro?
I have a 15" "Santa Rosa" macbook pro from 2007 that I used for video editing while I was in film school and still occasionally use for editing old short films as a hobby. My everyday computer is a PC gaming desktop running Windows 8 (which I hate). Now, at my new business I'm using a Square ipad POS system and an ipad inventory system. I'd like to be able to use my old macbook pro in my back office, rather than getting another PC, as it seems like I should stick with macs if I'm using an ipad POS, right? However, I've never updated my macbook from OSX 10.4.11, and I'm not sure if I can even update to a new OS at this point, from such an old one? This is the laptop model I have:
I looked into getting a refurbished macbook air, but I'm used to using 15" laptops or larger desktop screens for the last 7 years, and 13" laptops seem oddly small to me. The refurb 15" macbook pros are way out of my price range right now.
So, if there's any way to make my old, (decently fast for my purposes) 15" laptop functional in 2014 (i.e. by dumping all the files on a backup drive and updating to the latest OS it can handle), I'd like to continue using it for a while just for the 15" screen. Also, I have a bunch of firewire external drives I still use. Are there any OTHER reasons why this laptop would be unusable in 2014, other than the old OS? It has an Intel 2.4 GHz "Core 2 Duo" processor, usb 2.0, firewire 400, and firewire 800 ports. It doesn't have an HDMI port but I seem to recall buying a converter at some point to use it with a projector on campus, years ago. Maybe it was a different type of converter...
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, as I've missed the last 7 years of advances in Macs while using PCs for work.
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.4.11)